When I was a teenager, I think I engaged in a lot of motivated cognition. At least in an absolute sense; I don’t know how much is common. Much was regarding trees. Before I thought about this in detail, I assumed that how motivated cognition mostly works is this: I wanted to believe X, and so believed X regardless of the evidence. I looked for reasons to justify my fixed beliefs, while turning a blind eye to this dubious behavior.
On closer in(tro)spection, this is what I think really happened. I felt strongly that X was true because many good and smart adults had told me so. I also explicitly believed I should believe whatever my reasoning told me. I was inclined to change my beliefs when the information changed. However I knew that I did this, I feared that my reasoning was fallible, and I was terrified that I would come to believe not-X even though X was the truth. Then the truth would come out, or more evidence at least (and obviously the truth would be X), then all the good people who knew X would consider me evil, which was equivalent to being evil. They would also consider me stupid, for not seeing the proper counterarguments. So it was sickening to not be able to come up with a counterargument, because such a failure would immediately turn me into an evil and stupid person. Needless to say, I was quite an expert, especially on counterarguments.
So unlike in my usual model of motivated cognition, my arguments were directed at persuading myself of things I feared doubting, rather than justifying fixed beliefs to others. How often is this really what’s going on?
What motivates cognition?
Haha, something so satisfying about reading these pure logic posts.
Re the "threads about yourself" comments - I actually find them more compelling. Applying logic to internal experience, thought processes, motivation, emotion, etc is something I'd definitely like to see more of, rather than something I'd like to move on from.
The rational process, its examination,inspection, tuning and optimization is one of the most elementary foundationsof analyses of problems, situations and potential solutions. Whileintrospection on Katja's part may not focus on the exact area of rationale that:
a. you findinteresting to inspectb. you haveexperienced conflicting proclivities with
you surely do admitto the merits of having a lucid thought process, yes?
Clearly, this blogrecognizes not just the merits, but also the crucial necessity of posts likethese from Katja which might expose us to biases that we might, through periodsof rational misconduct, developed a blind-spot for. It states so explicitlywhen it describes itself as such:
'Overcoming Bias began in November ’06 as a group blog on the general themeof how to move our beliefs closer to reality, in the face of our natural biasessuch as overconfidence and wishful thinking, and our bias to believe we havecorrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing.'
What made you love the blog may have been your selection of posts that you sieved through the collective output available here or merely the fortunate coincidence of your content-consumption and interest but the posts are thematically consistent with what the blog sets out to achieve and I think it'd be a lesser blog in their absence.
Thinking about thoughts is just so much meta-frickin'-fun!